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Wednesday, May 28, 2014

Ahmadi Muslim Doctor Murdered For Being An Apostate

It's not just religious minorities that are considered infidels in Muslim-majority countries, members of Muslim sects like the Ahmadiyya are also considered apostates and subject to persecution and even death.

Qasim Rashid, a spokesperson for the Ahmadiyya community, has written an opinion piece in The Daily Caller about a Pakistani-born Ahmadi Muslim who became a doctor, moved to the U.S., gained citizenship, and was recently murdered while on a humanitarian visit to his homeland. All because he was the wrong kind of Muslim.

​Some 50 years before terrorists brutally murdered him because they believed him an infidel, Mehdi Ali Qamar was born a Muslim. But by the age of 10 Pakistan’s government declared him an infidel, an apostate, and in the opinion of many extremist clerics — worthy of death. But that didn’t deter him. By the age of 20 Pakistan’s government declared Qamar a criminal, liable to fine and imprisonment — only because he yet insisted on calling himself a Muslim. But that didn’t deter him. And even when Pakistan’s government added a death for blasphemy provision to the law just a few years later — giving state sanction to the previous ‘worthy of death’ opinion — Mehdi Ali Qamar fearlessly marched forward, undeterred.

And despite that state sanctioned persecution only for his faith, by the age of 30 Mehdi Ali Qamar became Dr. Mehdi Ali Qamar at one of Pakistan’s top medical institutions.

He started a family and brought his expertise in cardiology to the United States by the age of 40 — where he and his wife began raising their three beautiful boys. He arrived to a new country with a new language, new culture, and new demographic. Once again it may have seemed that he was an outsider — but that didn’t deter him. Dr. Qamar embraced American culture and showed by example that he saw no conflict between his faith as a Muslim and identity as an American — ultimately attaining his U.S. citizenship.

Always the servant of humanity, Dr. Mehdi Ali Qamar participated in numerous humanitarian medical missions to provide free cardiac care to the poor and indigent. And though Pakistan treated him so horribly, he held a soft spot for all his fellow Pakistanis, and returned to provide them the healthcare their government couldn’t or wouldn’t. And on one such humanitarian mission on May 26, 2014, to the world leading Tahir Heart Institute in Rabwah, Pakistan, Dr. Mehdi Ali Qamar breathed his last.

At the age of 50, as Dr. Medhi Ali Qamar fearlessly marched forward, militant extremists shot him in the chest and stomach 11 times while his wife and two-year-old son watched in horror.